WHATEVER THE STATE of their finances, the Langhornes went each summer to White Sulphur Springs, the most fashionable of the hot water spas across the Blue Ridge in the Allegheny Mountains. The spas had been the center of southern glamour and the marriage market since 1830, particularly “The White,” which to Nancy and Phyllis was a place of outlandish fantasy. It was their only contact with the outside world: a gigantic doll’s house dedicated to beaux and Belles, to highly organized courtly activity.
To get to the Springs, to lead a masked ball or a “German Cotillion” (a form of Viennese ballroom parade), to be a reigning Belle, was the only ideal in life worth pursuing for a southern debutante, even more so after the war. Your life could be transformed overnight by one appearance at a ball. In the meantime, you were surrounded by stiff and deeply bowing beaux who carried your satin dancing shoes to the ballroom entrance in little bags. If a mother couldn’t scrape together the funds to go, she sent her daughter in a chaperoned group, and then, Richmond style, drew down the blinds to feign absence. For Nancy, aged eleven, and Phyllis, aged ten, these trips under Irene’s mantle in 1890 were a sensation.
The White looked its part as a southern metropolis. It was a great stretched classical façade of white wood, with tiers of elevated balconies two hundred yards long, called “piazzas,” suspended on rows of Ionic columns. This giant, creaking construction was set in acres of lawns, surrounded by low hills in incongruously remote country. Before the railroads were extended up to their front doors, the spas were reached by river, canal, and stagecoach, from New Orleans, the Carolinas, Washington—an arduous southern migration. It was a matter of honor to make the journey, even for the hardest-hit families; a tribal affirmation. The White itself was a place of bare, carpetless discomfort inside, like some rustic Versailles, chaotic, overbooked, the ballrooms badly ventilated, the sanitation primitive, the linen dirty and flea-ridden. Families would sleep in the halls, divided from each other by sheets pinned up between them. The waters were said to have aphrodisiac properties, part of the reason for The White’s popularity. They were prescribed for dyspepsia but produced a violent craving for food, prolonging the treatment cycle indefinitely and straining the manners of the guests as they barged their way into the canteenlike dining rooms at mealtimes.
But Virginian pride was focused on these ramshackle wooden hotels. They had flourished before the war and even functioned during it, until they were shot at and wrecked or turned into field hospitals. Before the railroad money came, it was a purely southern affair, a return to prewar isolation, a way to forget the war itself, and the poverty. The lavishness of the prewar days had been replaced, from 1868, by “Calico Balls” and “Starvation Parties.” It was a way, too, to counter the shock of emancipation. The Belles became the pure white maidens of Provençal romance, antidotes to the surrounding blackness, whose honor was, literally, worth dying for. The cause of the last duel in Virginia, fought in 1868 between two penniless journalists, in which one was killed, was the honor of Mary Triplett, one of the top three Belles, and the charge that she had been insulted in a poem.
The adulation of the Belles had a direct relation to Virginia’s sense of defeat, the sense of injustice that could hardly be addressed in conversation. They had an electrifying effect on Richmond society. Greatest of all, until Irene ousted her, was Miss May Handy, who undoubtedly possessed star quality. Nancy and Phyllis knew everything about her: how she was schooled and watched over like an athlete; how her diet was prescribed; how, exceptionally for Richmond, she lived alone with her maid for company; how she was too grand for any beau to approach her. That was the crucial, misleading lesson: that love could only be pure and good if unsatisfied—the Provençal romance. “Yearning” and “loyalty” were the key words. The little girls of Richmond would rush out into Franklin Street to see her pass, wearing her bunch of “May Handy violets” and “smelling delicious,” then run around the block to meet her again. They chanted a skipping rhyme:
5 cents for cake
5 cents for candy
15 cents
Kiss May Handy
The Belles had similar looks. They were round and placid, with prominent busts and full hips, their faces not beautiful in the classic sense. May Handy was photographed on a throne, with a shining aureole rising behind her, and with a look of unreachable remoteness on her face.
The Langhornes were reported at The White in 1889—a year before Irene’s elevation—“all crowded into a small cottage in Virginia row,” with their colored nursemaids. “A rather unique and picturesque feature of the place is a pretty little spring-wagon drawn by a pair of goats. These docile and well-trained animals are the property of little Nannie (aged ten) and Phyllis Langhorne and can be seen trotting around the grounds with as many as six little girls aboard.” Nanaire, “remarkably bright and vivacious,” was mentioned as having given a “Violet lunch”—in which everything from the candles to the cake to the tablecloth, from the flowers to the ices, were, as one might expect, colored violet and wildly praised (“the candles hid their heads under violet bonnets …”) in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The “irrepressible” Chillie Langhorne had a stag party, which strangely included dancing as well as “high jinks” and songs that “kept everybody in that section of the place awake till dawn.”
But entrepreneurial money had changed The White. Harvard men were turning up, families from the North who brought a different, racier style. Lawyers and brokers came with the railroaders. And the southern girls, pushed by their mothers, were using the system to escape the menace of genteel poverty. The top ones were making good marriages outside, mostly to northerners, mostly to millionaires. The southern invasion of New York had begun.
Irene was hurled into a regime that required immense stamina to survive. There was little opportunity for sleep. The balls ended at 3:00 A.M. Riding began at seven. There was “Treadmilling” after breakfast—trooping around, four or five abreast, making dates for the “Germans” (the cotillions), which were held in the morning from eleven to one and again in the evening. No refreshments were served at these dances, and in the gaps there were “watermelon struggles,” bowling parties, “candy stews,” and photography sessions. The Germans, held in broad daylight in the middle of the morning in evening dress, were something new to a northern eye. One reporter wrote, “The effect produced by so many colours in perpetual motion beneath a strong light is very bewildering.”
Unlike May Handy, Irene had never been groomed for her part. She had simply emerged from Mr. Langhorne’s circus—no makeup, no attendant hairdresser—and was one day taken onto the dance floor at The White. She had been noticed by the New York papers while she was still a schoolgirl, to the annoyance of her father, who threatened to go to New York to shoot the editor. “She is tall and fair,” wrote the New York Times in the offending passage, “and dances like a dream. Her carriage is queenly and her complexion perfect.” She was taller than her sisters, serene, upright, with a dimple on her chin and (fashionably) “violet” eyes. She had the rounded hips and the forward-weighted bosom of the classic Belle, the bosom that tapered to a twenty-inch waist, of which she would say, coyly, “The beaux were supposed to be able to put their hands around it. But my Father never let them.” She had a luminous quality, “she lit up” a room like May Handy’s aureole, or, according to Nancy Lancaster, like Lady Diana Cooper.
Lizzie disapproved of Irene’s success, thinking it the height of vulgarity to be in the newspapers at all. And the crepe-veiled widows of Richmond were beginning to look down on Mr. Langhorne for having broken ranks by collaborating with the Yankee occupation and getting rich. The social system of Richmond deliberately excluded money. Nancy Lancaster remembered the first woman to wear a suit from New York, as late as 1910: “And we looked out of the window, fascinated. We called her the Southern Heiress.” Richmond was a town obsessed with mourning and commemoration, with unforgiving resistance to burying the hatchet, particularly on the part of the women. It was not so long ago, at The White, that Robert E. Lee had had to make his own symbolic gesture to end the war, by walking across the lawn to greet a shunned and ostracized family from Pennsylvania. When she was growing up with her mother, Lizzie, Nancy Lancaster recalled how “People in Virginia looked very down on the Astors and Vanderbilts. They were supposed to be fur traders and Mr. Vanderbilt was meant to have ferried a boat. I remember my grandmother talking about them. Shocked and horrified. We looked down on the deep South. We looked down on the North…. There was that terrific feeling that there was nothing better than a Virginian. You felt that was the passport.”
* * *
In 1893, Ward McAllister wrote to Irene, asking her to lead the grand march at the Patriarchs’ Ball in New York, which meant instant stardom. She would become one of America’s four top Belles. Chillie Langhorne would have hated McAllister, who came from Savannah, Georgia, but had, like some irresistible plastic surgeon, achieved absolute control over the social life of New York and the satellite resorts. His aim, and that of his coconspirator and patron Mrs. William Astor (the Mrs. Astor), was to keep the flashiest and most vulgar of the new-age profiteers out of the New York ballrooms, especially out of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, which held about four hundred people. McAllister, who invented Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” wrote gloating descriptions, after he had been dismissed by Mrs. Astor “like a servant,” of how mothers had come to plead with him, waving proof of lineage from kings of England, and First Families of Virginia, desperate for their daughters to be included in his whimsical list. He was a prototype walker, Nancy Reagan’s Jerry Zipkin. Louis Auchincloss described him as “the kind of fashionable ass that is taken up by idle women and despised by their husbands.”
This was Yankee vulgarity in excess: looting statues from France for dinner parties; having their guests dig for jewels with silver spades in sandpits on the table. The Patriarchs’ Ball was the great annual event of the Gilded Age, a moment of hysterical exclusivity. Chillie Langhorne was asked to escort Irene into the ballroom at Delmonico’s, where almost everyone who marked her dance card would be a millionaire, and where McAllister would be dressed as an archduke. And he willingly accepted.
From there, Irene was asked to open the Philadelphia Assembly, to be a queen of the Mardi Gras courts in New Orleans, to open every fête and dance on the national round. Chillie and Nanaire went with her. Nanaire, having become a stage mother, was glad to have these adventures with her debutante daughter, traveling from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, spending money, and free from her domestic chores. When Chillie wasn’t with Nanaire, chaperoning Irene to the ballrooms that she now “adorned,” he was out fixing the contracts on the New River, Bremo, and Clinch Valley divisions of the C&O, all quite close to home, and along the Big Sandy River in Kentucky. Irene had undoubtedly been very good for business, and all of them, now, were famous.
Nancy took pleasure in her early teens, while all this was going on, in making cutout figures from the fashion plates and new illustrated black-and-white magazines, calling the male figures after Irene’s beaux. She and Phyllis would construct houses and invent whole families to inhabit them. Nancy kept the score of Irene’s proposals, which by the time of her marriage would reach sixty-two—the rising index was public knowledge in Richmond, a matter of civic pride. Mirador, in full swing by 1893, was full of suitors, bringing lavish presents. A rich banker, twenty years older than Irene, sent her a diamond bracelet, telling her to throw it in the millpond if she wouldn’t accept it. Nancy got out their swimsuits, but Chillie made Irene send the big presents back. Nancy wrote to Phyllis in 1912, recalling “the excitement of Irene’s presents & oh the joy when her beaux began to send us bribes! Yr big doll & my 3 bottles of perfume in a Colgates box. I remember I got quite giddy with excitement & stood dazed in the hall.” In her memoir notes, Nancy wrote that many of the beaux were literary men “and as Irene had no literary talent whatever, they often recited the poetry they had prepared for her, to me.”
Irene, now known as “Queen Bee” in the family, was beyond reproach in her father’s adoring eyes. She was tactful, never opposing him. But she was slower-witted than the others. Already outmatched by Nancy’s speed and aggressiveness, her feelings were easily hurt and thus often provoked. Her supremacy went unquestioned, but the sisters fell upon her in the truth games. One day when she came back from a ball, the papers full of her praise, Nancy told her,“You may have looked beautiful at the party. But they should see the way you look now,” and Irene burst into tears.
Nancy was quite unlike Irene. She was small and trim, with striking, boyish looks, fair hair, and piercing blue eyes. She was restlessly energetic, sharp-tongued, always pushing herself to the center. Phyllis was her taller, darker, moody opposite, mysterious and introverted. The “vital influence” in her life, her twin soul, was the Mirador groom Charlie Jordan, an ex-jockey who, like Phyllis, was interested in music as well as horses. Phyllis would spend hours in her room polishing her bits and bridles, developing what she called a “homesickness for solitude.” Unlike other Langhornes, she didn’t need constant company. For this reticence, she was told that she wasn’t a Langhorne at all but a foundling, or a child of the Gypsies Nanaire always befriended. She was the sister all the others loved best.
Nancy and Phyllis had that strenuous, athletic quality that seemed so modern, unlike the older southern girls who fanned themselves on the piazzas. They not only competed fiercely in the horse shows but also played squash and tennis, shot quail and rode bicycles, wrapping themselves in sweaters when they took exercise, even in the heat. They were careful to look after their figures, their twenty-inch waists pulled in like Christmas crackers with belts tightened like girths—a vanity that was to cause Nancy grief in later years. They hid their complexions from the sun under wide Panama hats and went riding in kerchiefs like bank robbers, showing only their eyes, to keep out the red clay dust. They chewed dogwood stalks to whiten their teeth. Nancy had forgotten all this when she wrote in her memoir notes that they never considered their looks, and took their beauty for granted. They look extremely pretty in the photographs, in their long, plain skirts, their big hats attached loosely with scarves, as they giggle at the camera.
Nancy and Phyllis were the closest allies within the family, always taking the same side in the nerve-testing quarrels that amazed visitors. Irene was the peacemaker, officially neutral. Lizzie depended on Nanaire, and interceded for Keene and Harry with their father, who would criticize them for not going off on their own while never allowing them their independence. In later life, Nancy would mythologize her brothers in the Uncle Remus-type stories she told her children about her childhood. But in her correspondence with Phyllis, full of longings and reminiscences, they are hardly mentioned except as “poor Keene” and “poor Harry.”
Neither of them would ever conquer their addiction to drink in their short lives—any success would send Keene reaching for the bottle, unable to sustain what his father expected of him. He finally left his father’s employment after managing to spend $5,000 of the company’s money in a small railroad stop with one house, where with lavish catering supplies sent from Washington, he entertained an entire traveling circus. Nancy wrote to her father in 1914, “I am sorry to hear that Keene is off again. I really sh. put him in the Staunton Lunatic Asylum.” One of her nieces’ earliest memories as a child was hearing Nanaire on the telephone saying, “Oh God. Oh my God,” as she listened to the bulletin of Keene’s latest bender.
Both he and Harry married their wives on sprees, it was said, perhaps to explain that they were from lower-class origins. Keene married Sadie Reynolds from Kentucky, was bought a farm south of the James River, in a remote area, and declared himself “King of Buckingham County” because he was the only white man in the area. He dressed like his Irish antecedents, in well-cut, ill-matched tweeds, his hat cocked at an angle. He lived the life of an almost well-provided-for country gentleman, eventually doing his rounds in a battered Model T Ford. Harry married Genevieve Peyton, daughter of the Charlottesville stationmaster, who had ridden with John S. Mosby’s irregulars in the war—a great distinction, but not enough for Lizzie. After Buck married Edith Forsyth from quite a rich family, who did have a large manor nearby, she would say, “At least Buck married a lady.”
Born in 1874, five years before Nancy, Harry also had the misfortune to share at least some of the nursery years with Nancy and Phyllis, who teased him mercilessly. He was the cleverest boy, but also the least popular. He was humorless, compared to the others, with a streak of violence. He was also shy and excessively prudish, and it was this that Nancy and Phyllis found irresistible. They would kick up their heels and show him their knees, at a time when even ankles were forbidden from view. It would drive him to paroxysms of rage. “I have a real knack of infuriating people,” Nancy wrote to Phyllis much later, almost in surprise. “Do you remember how poor Harry would grit his teeth and vow he would like to choke me? Waldorf [her second husband] must often feel the same way.” You could always tell when the sisters were fixing for a tease: they would begin by rattling their bracelets.
Lizzie must often have wanted to choke Nancy, too, as Nancy began to exert her power. As her siblings grew up, Lizzie had made the mistake of trying to pull rank on them, believing she should be automatically deferred to and obeyed as the eldest. And when Nancy exploded at her, matching her will against hers, she was hurt and surprised. “She had great sorrow in her sisters’ treatment of her,” said her daughter Nancy Lancaster. “It did not match up to what she felt it was their duty to feel.”
Lizzie was “high tempered” and Nancy was merciless in attack; they were like “two bearcats” together. Phyllis described a Mirador reunion for Chillie’s birthday some years later, when nothing had improved between them: “It was nip and tuck whether Nancy and Liz were ‘going into action’ there and then. I was constantly kicking Nancy below the table, and above board giving her a look that said ‘not now, after the feast.’ I was relieved when they parted at 3 p.m. with no broken bones or black eyes and very few words. Nancy has less control of her tongue than me, but more control of her fists. I like using them when I get mad! and I think I should have one or two go’s at Liz—poor Liz, we are brutes about her.”
Lizzie’s image in Richmond was quite different from the way her sisters saw her. There she was an important and popular figure. Her house on Franklin Street was always full of people. She was considered a woman of taste, “who looked rich on nothing,” and was the soul of generosity. Even Nancy, in an unguarded moment, recognized that people thought Lizzie a “wit.” After her sisters’ success, Lizzie told people that in the future she should be properly addressed as “Mrs. Obscure Perkins.”
In Richmond, Nancy and Phyllis had a formidable schoolteacher called “Miss” Jennie Ellett, who remained high in Nancy’s pantheon all her life. A witty, bowlegged woman who was also something of a feminist, and who had a “secret lover at Harvard,” she inspired at least two generations with her instruction, her love of history and literature. She taught little American history—which may account for some of Nancy’s sweeping, ill-founded generalizations later in life. It was Virginian-Anglophile, based on the classics, on learning passages of Shakespeare and Edmund Burke by heart, on the dates of the English kings and queens—an early obsession with Nancy that never dimmed. “Nancy has always liked Royalties,” Phyllis wrote to Bob Brand when the king visited Cliveden for tea in 1908. “Say what she likes to the contrary, they thrilled her as a child to read about, and now they are giving her a ripple of joy to see now. Don’t tell her I said so.” Nancy declared that Jennie Ellett instilled in her a “passion for learning”—though in reality learning was never to be her strong point. John Grigg, in his biography of Nancy, identified this as the moment when she acquired, instead, a consuming reverence for learning itself and for her intellectual betters, which was to mold the course of her life. Jennie Ellett was deeply religious, as Nancy was now becoming, too.
In the summer of her thirteenth year, Nancy formed a deep admiration for an Oxford-educated English preacher, the Venerable Archdeacon Neve, who had recently arrived in the district as a missionary working with poor white hill farmers stranded in the Blue Ridge and Ragged Mountains. Some were descendants of German mercenaries, Hessians, brought over by the British in the War of Independence, and some simply remnants of the failures of westward pioneering. Nancy was amazed and shocked to discover such destitute, illiterate people in the middle of her childhood world.
The archdeacon, enormously tall, rugged looking, with a swiveling walleye, rambled over the mountains on his horse in all weathers, tending the sick, baptizing children, and opening these communities to the outside world. Nancy rode along with him. Having been awed by learning, she now fell in love with goodness, in the person of the archdeacon, and it never faded. “He was a man of God. From the first I loved and respected him,” she wrote. She read the Bible from cover to cover. She took it literally, for the rest of her life, particularly Genesis and Proverbs, its contents never differentiated by further study or reflection. It became her constant companion. She used it like the southern preachers, black and white, to “declare the truth.” Nancy discovered her own gifts for soapbox oratory, her gift for communicating through her wit at the Sheltering Arms, a home for the elderly and physically handicapped, where she was a great success. She discovered, too, that “all the people there had an inner life,” and from that “a lesson I have never forgotten: that happiness has nothing to do with possessions.” She wanted to be a missionary until the duality of her personality reasserted itself. To do anything in the world, to improve and crusade, you needed a little more power than Nanaire. You needed the power of Chillie and a little of his wealthy authority.
One of the images Nancy was cutting out from Life magazine was that of the Gibson Girl, the new icon of American female beauty and style that older girls across the nation were imitating in minute detail. The fame of her creator, Charles Dana Gibson, was something quite extraordinary, certainly for a graphic artist. In that great age of black-and-white illustrators, who came into their own with the invention of photogravure press and nationwide magazines, Gibson was the most influential and perhaps the most brilliant. He came from an old but modest Boston family, and at nineteen, he was taken up, as a young and unsuccessful artist, by Life magazine. Five years later, by 1891, his drawings, with their sharp conception of the social theater of New York in the Gilded Age, had caused something near to a social and sexual revolution. He had become the highest-paid employee ever in national magazine publishing, receiving one annual contract of $100,000.
Gibson had an extraordinary talent for a dashing, stylish outline drawing in pen and ink, using vigorous crosshatch shading, a style freed from the fussiness of woodcut or steel engraving and suited to the new halftone reproduction. He was a highly trained artist; there was nothing he couldn’t draw well. In America, one of his teachers had been Thomas Eakins, but his main influences were the Australian illustrator Phil May and, in England, George du Maurier of Punch. A brief stint in Paris at the Atelier Julien in 1889—on loan from Life—honed his final distinctive style. It added a Gallic sharpness and buoyancy and precision to his drawing and an ability to create a sense of chiaroscuro and almost of color on the page.
His satire on the New York scene was popular partly because it mocked the idea of money being synonymous with status. It would have gone down well in Richmond. He turned the Ward McAllisters into poodles, and portrayed rich hostesses sitting alone in their ballrooms, suddenly out of favor. Gibson moved easily in New York society—he was a charming, engaging man—and mocked it as much as he flattered it from a patrician, lightly moralistic Boston point of view. He believed in some romantic, aristocratic idealism, in which money played no part, in which “Love Conquers All”—a typical caption to his drawings. The vogue of Anglophilia—of what he saw as young American heiresses giving in, from the misguided snobbery of their mothers, to the desperation of down-at-heel English aristocrats—was one butt of his satire. The shameful spectacle of social-climbing industrialists and their wives scrambling for status was another.
Then, in 1890, he created the Gibson Girl. She was tall and straight, competent and strong, very sexy with her flowing straight skirts and waisted shirts and her imperious, steely gaze that fixed you from beneath half-closed eyelids. How much was disdain? How much adoration? It was clear that she wasn’t so independent that romance and the prospect of love and marriage didn’t occupy her thoughts constantly. But she married for love, not money—she couldn’t be bought. It was another twist in the chivalric ideal that had sustained the spas of Virginia. But this time the Gibson Girl was the flowering of the all-American pioneer spirit, untouched by European imitation. She was a national treasure, a definition of style that taught an entire generation how to walk, talk, and dress. The fact that all Gibson’s models were New York society girls made the ideal even more exciting and unattainable.
The Gibson Girl was much more like the real Nancy and Phyllis than the Belle Irene. She was an outdoor creature who existed only in the summer, riding, bicycling, playing sports that were unheard-of for women until now. Gibson had wanted her to be equal if not superior to men. He drew her in a football match set in the future between Harvard and Vassar, in which the Vassar girls were dressed as generals, perhaps displaying a certain level of sexual anxiety. His Gibson beau was a stunned, tongue-tied votary, brittle, incompetent, confused. He was often modeled physically on Gibson’s handsome and equally famous friend, the journalist and adventurer Richard Harding Davis, whose books echoed the Boston romantic ideal. The phenomenon was a serial soap opera and a marketing bonanza—there was a huge trade in Gibson Girl ephemera—that lasted for almost twenty years, until the 1920s flapper pushed it aside. The art critic Robert Hughes once depicted the Gibson Girl as the American counterpart of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the femme fatale who obsessed Huysmans and the Decadents. The Gibson Girl was the New World version—wholesome, full of innocence and promise.
Irene went back to New York with her parents in the summer of 1894 for the annual horse show. Irene was never much of a rider compared to Nancy and Phyllis, but by this time she was required to do hardly more than hold the bridle to have yet another accomplishment attributed to her. One night, a dinner was given in her honor at Delmonico’s, the most fashionable restaurant in New York, and the scene of the Patriarchs’ Ball. At an adjoining table sat Richard Harding Davis, now the Greek god of New York café society. Beside him sat his friend Charles Dana Gibson.
Never one to pass up admiration, Irene made a detour, as she left, and rustled past their table. A third guest who was dining with them and knew Irene summoned her back and made the introduction. There was tea the following day and then, as Irene wrote to a friend, “I visited his [Gibson’s] studio, something unheard of in those days. I played and sang ‘Goodnight Beloved’ and, well, I just sang him into it.”
Gibson was hooked and began his seduction by sending Irene a drawing of a Gibson Girl singing at the piano, eyes closed, mouth open, with a choir of disembodied cherubim crowding the background of the picture, also in full chant, their eyes bursting with effort. It was called Love Song. It was an example of Gibson’s most vulgar style, falling into a pastiche of Spanish devotional painting, in the cause of infatuation. It might have been Irene’s autoportrait. It was either very like the way she liked to play the piano or certainly how she did so from then on. Irene, who had never read a book, disingenuously sent Gibson In Ole Virginia, by Thomas Nelson Page, to show where she came from.
Chillie Langhorne hadn’t taken in the fame of Charles Dana Gibson, despite his recent education in New York society. He gave him a rough ride when he arrived at Mirador in a buggy from the station, suggesting that he keep the buggy waiting for the next train. He couldn’t see the point of what he called “this damn charcoal artist” and “yankee sign painter.” Having got this far, and now able to take her pick of any one of America’s eligible young men, Irene was perversely settling for the equivalent of an impoverished Virginian. Chillie warned her that she would starve if anything happened to him: it was clear that he didn’t own any railroad stock. But Nancy and Phyllis liked him. They had read about him and asked him to “Tell us about Bohemia.” All Irene’s suitors melted away in the following months and she never looked at anybody else. Chillie Langhorne was won over by Gibson’s charm and a letter from the ever-useful Thomas Nelson Page. When they were, at first secretly, engaged, Irene wrote to a friend, “He makes loads of money, or plenty anyhow and is the most determined soul you ever knew. In London we shall have a delicious time. He knows many people and his reputation has gone before him.”
Their wedding in Richmond in November 1895 was seen as a symbolic end of the Civil War. It was the end, too, of the Belle era. The event was as fascinating in the popular imagination as the wedding of Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harry Payne Whitney, a marriage that would link two families of enormous wealth, the following year. The Gibson wedding was described in the headline of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which devoted its front page to the event, as the marriage of “Beauty and Genius.” For Gibson’s fans, it must have been difficult to separate fantasy from reality: Irene really did seem to be the incarnation of their Girl, in which case it was also a day of mourning. In fact, something strange had happened. The drawings that Dana Gibson did of Irene now bore no comparison to the photographs of her as a Belle. The flat, parted hair had been brushed up and back, showing a long neck, the face had been thinned and streamlined. She seemed to have lost weight. The wide eyes had dimmed. The transition from Southern Belle to Gibson Girl was seamless, if cosmetic.
The ceremony took place at St. Paul’s Church, the church of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Private railroad cars had brought more stars from New York: Richard Harding Davis, who was an usher; Stanford White, already famous for his Memorial Arch at Washington Square and for Madison Square Garden; Dana Gibson’s brother, Langdon, an Arctic explorer who had been on one of Peary’s expeditions. Many of them stayed in the magnificent Jefferson Hotel, newly refurbished, with its staircase (later used in the film of Gone With the Wind) and its live alligators in the lobby. At Nanaire’s house on Grace Street, the guests were given, among other forgotten southern delicacies, “Boucheese St. Jourdan,” “Charlotte Russe S. Honore,” and “Viennoise Panier Garni.”
The couple set off for Gibraltar, Spain, Naples, Rome, Florence, Monte Carlo, Paris, and London. Here they installed themselves in Albany, the exclusive, barracklike apartment building in Piccadilly, where, until Irene’s arrival, no woman had been allowed to take up residence. At the first dinner party Irene gave—a disaster at which the food ran out almost immediately, and for which she was teased for weeks by her friends sending around food parcels—the guests included John Singer Sargent and Henry James, “gravely wounded and abysmally depressed,” suffering from years of neglect of his novels and currently at work on The Awkward Age.